complexity & change in environment, biomedicine & society

John Berger on peasants and history (from 1979)

For John Berger, in Pig Earth (New York: Pantheon, 1979), peasant culture is a ‘culture of survival” and bourgeois culture is a “culture of progress”:

p. 203

“Modern history begins-at different moments in different places-with the principle of progress as both the aim and the motor of history.. Cultures of progress envisage future expansion. They are forward-looking because the future offers ever larger hopes… A culture of survival envisages the future as a sequence of repeated acts for survival. Each act pushes a thread through the eye of a needle and the thread is tradition. No overall increase is envisaged.”

p. 212

“If one looks at the likely future course of world history, envisaging either the further extension and consolidation of corporate capitalism in all its brutalism, or a prolonged, uneven struggle waged against it, a struggle whose victory is not certain, the peasant experience of survival may well be better adapted to this long and harsh perspective than the continually reformed, disappointed, impatient progressive hope of an ultimate victory.”